


The Catalogue of Bones

by tin_girl



Category: Durarara!!
Genre: Angst, Canon-Typical Violence, Dramatic, M/M, Overuse of Metaphor, Post-Series, so much drama, very dramatic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-13
Updated: 2019-09-13
Packaged: 2020-10-17 20:58:08
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,501
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20627441
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tin_girl/pseuds/tin_girl
Summary: Izaya, a kid, a junkie, high on the city and wanting to know everything more than he wanted to be safe. Shizuo imagines meeting him before he dyed his hair, and before Izaya got his knives, some awkward past made of still-drying clay that they could change without having to break it.Starring: Izaya as the boy who had to grow up all on his own and grew sideways instead, and Shizuo, the angel of vengeance. In other words, the past takes a bite out of Izaya, and Shizuo reconsiders.





	The Catalogue of Bones

**Author's Note:**

> I had no idea what rating to choose. For details, see notes below. 
> 
> Look, this is the best thing I've ever written, but it's also a mess. As for the timeline, I think the fic works as something set both after season 1 and season 2 though it briefly references the latter, and is heavily influenced by something Shinra says about Izaya in volume 13 of the novels (which I haven't actually read, so): 
> 
> ["He may seem cold blooded, but he is more human and his heart more brittle than anybody else's, so much so that if filled with human love or betrayal it will break easily, which is why, I think, he chose, from the beginning, to avoid it all. To love humanity, you understand? Not to accept it, not to face it, to avoid it."
> 
> "Avoid?"
> 
> "Yes. It's something like how a windsock flies. On first sight, mouth wide open, like he's smiling and accepting everything, with a huge capacity... But in reality it's a cylinder with no bottom. That's why any amount can go through the mouth. And he can love anything."]
> 
> Anyway, my fanfic is most definitely set before any such events, and Shinra didn't say all that to Shizuo, anyway, but I assumed it as something Shinra occasionally tells people for the sake of my near non-existent plot. Shsh, just pretend it makes sense. 
> 
> Also, Jesus, Shinra. He actually called Izaya a windsock. I mean, can you believe that guy
> 
> NOW WITH A LOVELY PODFIC, link below!! <3

This is how we are, a conversation; you never cared to call me something like my name.  
I never cared to see you in any way but under my boot with blood on your teeth.  
There is no moon above us, even when the sun’s gone to hide at the nearest bar.  
This is not a war that can be won with pickets and strikes.  
The only way to end the battle  
Is that someone has to die.

(…)

You brought a knife to a gunfight,  
a gun to face the firing squad, a one child firing squad,  
knees stuck together with blood and chicken feathers.  
  
_Please_, you ask me,  
_Let me win one last time_.  
  
And I learn that breaking is easier than bending;  
And I learn how my name sounds on your lips.

~~Grey, The Chicken Boy

They fall upon Ikebukuro like a locust swarm time after time, destroying everything in their wake and people too helpless to do anything but watch. Shizuo catches knives in his teeth, and Izaya laughs and laughs and laughs as the sun bleeds out like a cry for help, only no one will hear because no one is listening.

Lampposts, trash bins, café tables, everything flying, and it’s that laughter that Shizuo hates the most. Catch me if you can, Izaya taunted once, and Shizuo broke plates, because they both knew he couldn’t. Sometimes Izaya says, once upon a time, and time stops, curious what they whisper about it on the streets, but even with time stopped, Izaya slips through Shizuo’s fingers like water, like air, like he doesn’t have bones for Shizuo to ground to dust – impossible, because Shizuo remembers them crack sometimes, and wakes, nauseous, wakes, even when he hasn’t been sleeping.

Celty called it a ballet once, when Izaya runs, Shizuo follows, and things fly, and Shinra said, only it’s not your toes you’re ruining, but Ikebukuro’s. Shizuo doesn’t care – wants it all ruined, wants to throw everything at Izaya so that he can know what he’d do once there wouldn’t be anything to throw left.

“Sounds like a love story,” Shinra laughed, then, and Shizuo still doesn’t know why he didn’t break a desk lamp on his head, why he didn’t even want to. Why, instead of anger, all he felt was something chewed-up and grey.

Shizuo catches knives in his teeth, and Izaya laughs and laughs and laughs as the sun – Izaya laughs, always, has been laughing since before they met, and so, when he stops, the world breaks.

*

Their knuckles don’t get bloody no matter how much of the city Shizuo throws, the skin there never splits. Izaya flicks knives his way like an afterthought, and Shizuo dodges, catches, dodges, catches, catches and the blade bites into his skin but he’s too busy to notice, shaking it off. A few circles later, Izaya leaping from billboard to billboard, Izaya on sidewalks, Izaya on walls, Izaya on roofs, the blade glints and Izaya kicks it up and catches without hurting himself.

“Shizu-chan,” he whines, all mocking, all tease. “You got it dirty.”

Disgusting, he says, you monster, he says, ew, he says, and then, street signs crooked between them like a crossroads gone wrong, licks the blood off.

There’s something matter-of-fact about it, as if Shizuo’s not there, Izaya considering the knife curiously first and then closing his lips over the blade as if for a moment he needs both his hands free. What happened to disgusting, Shizuo wants to roar, what happened to ew? He throws a vending machine, and Izaya sidesteps neatly without looking up, red in the corner of his mouth that wasn’t there before.

I’d kill you, Shizuo thinks, if you came back to life after. I’d kill you, he thinks, if I could do it over and over again.

“Old money,” Izaya says when the blade’s all clean and disappears into his sleeve like a magician’s trick stored away for some other audience. “What have you been drinking?”

“Milk,” Shizuo says, and when he gets his hands on Ikebukuro, the same thing happens to it that marks a good loaf of bread – you can hear a cracking sound and there’s too many crumbs after. Izaya laughs and skips away, a dancer escaped out of a music box, and the sound is so like always that Shizuo almost forgets how his blood must coat Izaya’s throat now, how everything Izaya says makes Shizuo’s wounds pulse as if the skin there doesn’t know if it wants to open or close.

“What fun!” Izaya laughs, and it’s day, and it’s night, and it’s summer, and it’s winter, and it’s yesterday, and it’s tomorrow, and Shizuo always talks of killing him but when he imagines catching Izaya at last, he can’t glimpse beyond that clench of fingers on collar.

Catch me if you can, and Shizuo can’t, but if he could, what then?

*

In his dreams, always that crack of bones, and in his awakes, always the same.

*

“Imagine it,” Shinra said once, after a sigh. “A house, no home. Three kids, or is it two kids and a once-boy? Yellow tiles in the kitchen, a green tea towel, tap dripping and no one there to do anything about it. Every night, the twins put to bed, and quiet after.”

“It doesn’t justify anything.”

“Who said anything about justifying?” Shinra said, amused. “Justify? No. But it explains a thing or two, doesn’t it?”

*

On the day the world breaks, they’re fighting like they always do, a spontaneous choreography among flying objects and people running out of their way like they’re an avalanche and won’t ever stop.

That’s what goes wrong first – Izaya stops.

Amidst a crowd dissolving like sand grains trickling down the neck of an hourglass, the sun cruel behind him like a fist to the mouth, Izaya stops skipping back, and it’s not like usual – he’s not perching before taking a leap, he’s stepped into some past where Shizuo can’t follow. Shizuo thinks that, were he to run at him now and take a swing, his fist would go through Izaya as if through air, as if Izaya’s not there, as if, instead, he’s Ikebukuro’s old postcard, the sad kind that no one ever sends but some collect.

He’s frozen, something open about his expression – naked, even – and his gaze is fixed somewhere behind Shizuo, but Shizuo doesn’t turn around, because he can’t possibly look away. He stares at Izaya – caught mid-laugh and tricked into some fear even though all the checkmates were supposed to be his – and thinks that this is what kids look like when they go to the bathroom at night, believing in monsters, and a door down the hallway creaks open.

Shizuo doesn’t know why – will never know why – but with Izaya’s world broken all over his face, Shizuo’s world breaks too, somehow, and so does his heart.

I don’t deserve to see this, he thinks with startling clarity. He doesn’t deserve for me to see him like this.

And isn’t that funniest of all? When he always thought that Izaya deserved everything bad, knives, bullets, broken bones, ripped veins, bruises and black eyes, misery and grief. A flea, drinking Ikebukuro’s blood and let him choke! Only now that he’s choking, Shizuo can’t look, but looks and looks and looks and wonders about time. If he made the hands of his watch twirl back, would the sun come back to the sky as if it forgot something there, would Izaya’s lips draw up into a smile, open into a laugh, would Shizuo’s broken heart stitch itself back closed?

Broken and swelling now, something rising up in his throat and maybe everything inside him is so inflamed that he’ll vomit it up? He wants Izaya to finish his laughter, and wants to yell, but they both stay quiet and around them the city is like something muffled by a blanket, as if, at last, one of them is about to die.

“Izaya,” Shizuo says, and it tastes like milk.

“I thought so!” someone says behind Shizuo, voice hoarse like the scrape of metal on asphalt, and Shizuo would know. “Long time no see, Orihara-kun.”

Izaya’s name in syllables, like chess pieces tipping and falling to thud against the board, one by one. Izaya looks younger than when Shizuo first met him, and when Shizuo finally turns around, his hands are already clenched into fists.

“Hello there,” the man says, a teasing wave of fingers, and he’s tall and lean like an exclamation mark, coat expensive and face mean as if he’s spent half his life frowning in discontent and the other half laughing at ruined lives. “You must be the bartender?”

Shizuo hates him on spot, and not the way he hated Izaya at first sight. Order of the universe upended, Shizuo grabs the man by the lapel of that expensive camel-skin whatever that he’s wearing and throws him as far as it goes. The man crashes into a billboard, topples to the ground, and then laughs, as if he doesn’t know that the best way to survive an animal attack is curling up and pretending to be dead.

Shizuo’s about to cross the road towards the man and hit him until he’ll look like a plum, but a noise stops him, half-smothered, nothing really, a quiet whimper. When he turns around, Izaya’s staring at his open hands like they’re a freshly unwrapped gift he needs to examine, turning them this way and that, flexing his fingers.

“Ah,” he says, and looks up with a smirk ready for Shizuo but no laugh. “What a pain.”

Shizuo stares at him, and hopes that Izaya will assume Shizuo attacked the guy because he’d interrupted their fight. After all, when their fights stop, the world itself stops, Shizuo’s very heart stops, and – everyone knows this – things stop when they break.

*

Sometimes the sun burns itself out like a funeral pyre behind Izaya, a halo around his head, and Shizuo doesn’t know what it means when it makes him think of devils but looks angelic anyway.

*

“Something strange happened today,” Shizuo says later, stretched out on Shinra’s couch, his legs in Celty’s lap.

“Your fights are not strange,” Shinra sighs. “It’s like weather broadcast.”

“There was a man there, and Izaya looked all – _scared_.”

Shinra peers up at him through his fringe from where he’s sprawled on the floor, remote control in hand. He looks merciless, somehow, and Shizuo wants to tell him to forget it, wants to leave before Shinra can say whatever it is he’s about to say.

“Shizuo,” he starts, slowly, the way he might push a syringe needle into one’s vein. “Why do you think Izaya’s untouchable just because you don’t touch him?”

Later that night, when Shizuo dreams, Izaya laughs and laughs and laughs, catch me if you can, and Shizuo can’t, and he never thought that someone else might. He tries to snatch the end of Izaya’s coat and wakes up clawing at his own skin, blood welling up like the ticking of a clock.

“What have you done, Izaya?” he says into the quiet, and remembers Izaya licking Shizuo’s blood off a knife like the world would never end. “What the fuck have you done?

*

The next time Shizuo chases Izaya down streets and across roofs, he knows exactly what he’ll do once he catches him. Maybe that’s why he does, fingers curling around Izaya’s collar so hard that Izaya twirls around. Shizuo pushes, and Izaya’s back hits an alley wall, Shizuo’s hand slapped flat next to his head.

“Not very romantic, are we, Shizu-chan?” Izaya drawls. “Take me out on a date first.”

“Who was he?” Shizuo snarls, and he has no right to ask – funny that – but he asks anyway, because if Izaya says a word, Shizuo’s ready to kill the man – funnier still. He doesn’t know why that is, doesn’t know how this strange loyalty fits with his hatred for Izaya, still there, like a pulse, only twisted.

“So demanding, Shizu-chan! Has no one taught you—”

“Izaya,” Shizuo snaps, yanking him closer by that stupid fur collar, and why does he wear it in summer, anyway, what does he need to dress warm against? “Who _was _he?”

Izaya stares at him unimpressed, glee replaced by impatience, and Shizuo remembers how once, back in Raijin, he was looking for a play for Kasuka in the school library, and Izaya started talking to him about bones.

He was hidden somewhere behind the shelves, voice close, but, when Shizuo pushed books off, no one there on the other side of the case.

“Vertebrae,” Izaya said, and when Shizuo rounded the bookcase, nothing. “The lunate bone.”

Laughter, ulna, laughter, calcaneus, laughter, scapula, and Shizuo couldn’t find him no matter how fast he ran, no matter how many books toppled to the ground.

“You always say how you’ll break my bones,” Izaya said from somewhere, everywhere, and paper rustled too close and too faraway. “Two hundred and eight of them and all empty promises.”

When Shizuo finally found him and pinned him to a bookcase, Izaya seemed halfway between amused and irritated.

“I wish you’d commit and break one already,” he said, and when he slipped away, Shizuo didn’t know if it was because he’d let him.

“He’s someone I borrowed information from,” Izaya says now, and doesn’t slip away, not yet. “It was years ago.”

“When you borrow something,” Shizuo says, feeling some strange dread settle in his stomach. “You have to give it back.”

“How smart of you, Shizu-chan!” Izaya says, and a blink and he’s gone, feet away already, at the mouth of the alley, grin like the curve of a knife. “I’ve always known school was good for you.”

“Dammit, Izaya, why don’t you just fucking tell me—” Shizuo growls, and when he hits the wall, bricks crack like a thousand of bones.

“Have you ever heard of Edith Piaf? I assume not, since you have no culture. Anyhow, rest assured, je ne regrette rien.”

Shizuo looks it up later, a tangle of consonants punched into his browser, and thinks, liar. He remembers Izaya stopped between breaths like failed clockwork, half fear, half regret, an olive in a martini glass and the past about to down it in one gulp.

*

Shinra tells him, one late evening, that Izaya is like a windsock – “mouth always open like he’s smiling, but actually just a cylinder with no bottom, and any amount can go through, he can love anything.” He says it in a practiced way, vowels lazy, as if he’s already said it before.

Izaya doesn’t smile, Shizuo thinks. Izaya laughs.

He remembers wanting to rip the sound out of Izaya’s mouth, and doesn’t remember realizing that he wanted that only to be able to swallow the laughter himself, have it lodge somewhere inside him where, surely, it’d be safer than in Izaya’s throat.

Shinra calls Izaya a windsock, and Shizuo picks at the couch’s edge, distracted, hard enough for the fabric to tear and for stuffing to crawl out. What he feels is a kind of indignation, a how dare you of a sort. There’s Shinra, unaffected, talking about Izaya as if Izaya is transparent, naked, cold, and why does Shizuo feel so himself, transparent, naked, cold? Izaya, dissected, all his soft parts poked and prodded, carelessly, until they rip, and then some. Couch stuffing all over Shizuo’s lap in motes now, and he can’t stop seeing Izaya like that – a grief of a wide smile, no bottom.

All he wants is for Izaya to never hear it, and maybe in a moment, he will grab Shinra by the collar and ask him who else has he told this little theory of his to, and maybe, once Shinra tells him – and he will – Shizuo will slaughter them all, one by one.

His heart breaks in an exhausted way, no crack, like an overripe, bruised fruit falling from a branch and its skin too thin to survive it, and Shizuo wonders how come when it’s already broken once?

*

There once was a boy who had a lot of toys,

Only all the toys were really boys,

And the boy himself was actually a toy.

*

“Well, you know, back in high school, Izaya used to do crazy shit for information,” Shinra says, waving his hand, and Shizuo raises his eyebrows. “Yes, I see what you mean, but _crazier. _Now he has a brand and means and a secretary.”

“What’s ‘crazier’?”

“With Izaya? When there’s an exchange, and you give something of your own instead of someone else’s,” Shinra says, and Shizuo is full of bad feelings.

“Information for information?”

“You could say that, I suppose. Are you staying for dinner? I was hoping it’d be just me and Celty, actually, but naturally, you’re welcome to—”

Shizuo forgets to shut the door behind him and punches the elevator key so hard it stays jammed inside, thinking about transactions.

And what if Izaya has a bottom after all?

*

When he sees Izaya after Piaf, he tries not to fight him, but chairs and tables and signposts leave his hands before he realizes he’s holding them, and it’s muscle memory, run, grab, throw, run, grab, throw, run grab, throw, catch now, catch.

Izaya throws a knife, and it lodges in Shizuo’s forearm. Across Ikebukuro’s wreckage, Izaya watches the blood well up like he’s remembering how it tastes and Shizuo tosses the knife back, a peace offering, only nothing about this is peaceful, and they’re already off, chasing each other again, the world a blur and Shizuo wishes it would stay that way.

And then, Izaya balancing with one foot on top of a traffic light, as if he’s something with its own gravity, and Shizuo asks, because he’s not too proud to do so.

“What did you give him?” he says, calm now, and when they were in high school, Shizuo almost broke Izaya’s wrist once. Izaya, reaching to steal a makizushi out of Shizuo’s lunchbox, and Shizuo fast enough for once, fingers digging into Izaya’s skin until he could feel the smoothness of all his small bones. Shinra, trying to calm him down, voice fake-light, and Kadota with his stern ‘hey’s, but they weren’t really there – it was just Izaya, smiling slyly as Shizuo’s fingers dug in deeper and deeper, smiling even as he frowned in pain. Nothing existed apart from the pressure on Izaya’s carpal bones – he would name them, later, recited one by one as he walked the edge of the roof, arms spread – growing, growing, and would they snap? If someone mentions forever, that’s what Shizuo thinks of even now – Izaya’s eyes on his and those bones sliding under skin, how, somehow, he never broke them, even though everyone, himself included, had expected he would.

Izaya’s wellbeing always depended on his ability to dodge flying chairs and desks, but Shizuo still wonders, now, if maybe he could never catch Izaya because he didn’t really want to.

What made him angry that day wasn’t Izaya trying to steal his makizushi, anyway, it was that he’d steal it and then wouldn’t eat it.

“Something worthless,” Izaya says, leaping off the traffic light before Shizuo’s fingers can close around his ankle and Shizuo chases him, will chase him to the ends of the Earth, only – here’s the catch – the Earth has no end.

*

The city is empty like a plague fell on it, and they don’t run this time. They’re standing in a street, and Izaya’s staring at his open hands, turning them this way and that, flexing his fingers.

“Ah,” he says, and looks up with a smirk ready for Shizuo but no laugh. “What a pain.”

What a pain, only not, what a bother, but, it hurts.

“What the fuck have you done?” Shizuo asks, because he’s not too proud to ask, and Izaya laughs, but it’s different than usual, broken halfway through.

“There once was a boy who had a lot of toys,” he says, and it’s the end of summer, asphalt still hot, but he looks cold in that stupid coat of his anyway.

“What did you give him?” Shizuo asks, because when he kills, he wants to have a reason.

“I told you, Shizu-chan,” Izaya says, sing-song but that fear still all over him, and it’s like he’s looking through Shizuo, like Shizuo is a keyhole to some dark, dark room. “It was worthless.”

And Shizuo wakes up wanting to burn Ikebukuro to the ground, because what does Izaya know about anything’s worth?

*

“Where the fuck have you been?” Shizuo asked, years before, Izaya scratched and bruised as if someone got him finally, only Shizuo never had.

“Wouldn’t you like to know?” Izaya said and dodged everything Shizuo threw with his old grace, no wince of pain, wounds licked clean, but why were they there in the first place?

“Think of bruises,” Izaya whispered from behind him, where Shizuo didn’t expect him. “All those crushed capillaries.”

Months later, on a roof, Shizuo would grab Izaya by the wrist and time would stop.

All those crushed capillaries, and he wanted to make a habit of killing Izaya in his dreams, because otherwise, he never would, but even there Izaya was always three steps ahead, untouchable, and why won’t you just tell me?

“Why won’t you just tell me what he wants from you, dammit!” Shizuo yells, loud enough for all of Ikebukuro to hear and cower, but when Izaya laughs, it’s louder and cracks in the middle, so that something broken climbs out of the sound as if hatched. Izaya throws knives at him, and sometimes Shizuo steps aside in time, and sometimes he doesn’t, his flesh clenching around the blade as if it missed it, as if it’s not fucked up.

Shinra calls him a windsock, but Shizuo hears the truth he never wanted to know before in Izaya’s voice – that he’s really a teacup placed on too high a shelf.

“All those crushed capillaries,” Izaya says, shaking his head. “All those ground bones,” and Shizuo wants someone to cut off his hands.

*

Once, Shizuo couldn’t imagine Izaya sleeping. It seemed too lonely a thing for someone like him to do, and Shizuo used to think that maybe Izaya didn’t sleep, a flea, a vampire, always sucking blood and never tiring of it enough to need rest. Now, he thinks maybe sleeping is all Izaya does.

He imagines Izaya in a worn t-shirt before bed, Izaya cooking, Izaya cleaning up, picking up stockings and skirts, the twins asleep already, and he hates Shinra, he _hates _him. He’s never wanted to look at Izaya and think of whys.

He takes a day off, Tom so surprised that he tries to promise Shizuo three. He sits in a blind alley, next to an overflowing dumpster, swallowed by shadows, watching the entrance to the building where Izaya has his apartment – his office – all those glass windows, all those books, all those game pieces thrown recklessly together.

He watches the people who enter the building, and he doesn’t like the look of most of them, but none wear that expensive coat he remembers grabbing not quite hard enough to tear, or maybe the fabric had been too good to give?

Sun violent, everything reflected in the glass, Shizuo doesn’t see Izaya even once. He watches Namie leave at some point, and laughs at that. Does Izaya really trust her, he muses, and knows instantly that no, Izaya doesn’t, because he doesn’t trust anyone, not even himself.

How, Shizuo wonders, does someone like that sleep?

His bones ache from never changing position but he won’t move even as the sun scratches a bow into the sky and crashes into the skyscrapers Shizuo can’t see over the bricks and the trash. Maybe it’s because it’s too warm for coats, he thinks when it’s nearing nine, but no one in the street quite has that loose quality to them, as if too relaxed to run when in danger. Shizuo can remember everything from the man’s square shoulders to his tailored pants, and doesn’t see him, because if he did, his knuckles would already be split.

Lost in thought, he flinches when something lands next to him, with the grace of an untamed cat, but heavier.

“Didn’t it get boring, Shizu-chan?” Izaya says, melodic, and Shizuo is tired enough that he thinks he could fall asleep to it. “What do you want from him, anyway?”

“To leave you the fuck alone,” Shizuo says, truthfully, and watches Izaya put his hand to his chest, fingers splayed.

"How touching,” he lilts, smirk so sharp that, were Shizuo to reach out and try to wipe it off, he’d surely cut himself. “You want me all to yourself, hmmm?”

Shizuo glances his way, and Izaya reaches out, slow like a wave breaking, to drag his fingers through Shizuo’s hair. He pushes it back, and there’s the scrape of Izaya’s nails on Shizuo’s scalp, so confusing, so foreign that Shizuo has to close his eyes against it, the way he might when overwhelmed at a busy railway station, too many people, too many languages, too many blinking signs. Later, he will tell himself, I didn’t lean towards it. Later still, he will tell himself, I didn’t lean back.

“Tell me,” he asks, Izaya’s fingers retreating, Shizuo’s hair tumbling into his eyes, and because Shizuo keeps them closed, he doesn’t notice until it’s too late, until there’s already something cold at his throat, until he knows it’s Izaya’s flick blade by the way his skin accommodates it, as if Shizuo’s veins long to be cut.

But of course.

“Shizu-chan,” Izaya chirps, mock disappointed. “Don’t you know curiosity killed the cat?”

“I thought I was a monster,” Shizuo says, and Izaya laughs, probably because Shizuo got it all wrong.

“That you are,” he says, easily, blade gone but Shizuo’s skin still taut where it was, still all goose bumps. “Only your hair’s too soft.”

When Shizuo opens his eyes, Izaya’s gone already, as if Shizuo dreamed him, and maybe he did.

*

When Shizuo was small, he used to think that when you turn the tv off, the cartoons stop, paused, waiting for you to turn it back on the next day mid-sentence. For the longest time, he thought their tv was broken.

“Izaya doesn’t just goad you all over the city,” Shinra tells Shizuo over the hum of the news, stretched in Celty’s lap and philosophical. “You’re just too loud yourself to hear all the other people who yell his name on the streets,” he says, and Shizuo forgot it already, the disappointment of learning that when you turn the tv off, the cartoons go on playing.

Izaya, somewhere, even now, doing something, thinking of someone, and not just paused and waiting for Shizuo to chase him. Izaya, a whole miserable life in another district, and he might have knives, and he might have teeth, but the world’s jaws are bigger.

*

Shizuo follows Izaya in search of someone else who might be following him, and Izaya doesn’t laugh for half an hour. When his shoulders start shaking at last, he’s leaning on a bus stop, even though Ikebukuro is the district of trains, railway tracks falling into it and out like the arteries and veins of a failing heart. The sky is indigo blue, the shade of when first stars appear, only one never sees stars in Tokyo, except for fallen ones.

They’ve been standing a distance away for minutes, Izaya under a flickering light, Shizuo wrapped in shadows except for the glint of the tip of his cigarette, and when Izaya laughs, it’s soundless. Shizuo frowns – it scares him.

“You’ve never been subtle, Shizu-chan,” Izaya says, hand gripping the side of the bus stop as if for support.

“I was quiet.”

“You _smell_.”

“Just wanted to see if someone was following you, ‘s all.”

Izaya cranes his neck, and what neck it is – like a flute, step on it once and it will snap in two.

“A dog’s been following me,” he says, so dry it must have scratched Izaya’s throat on its way out.

Shizuo’s a dog, sure, and Izaya’s a flea, yes, he’s even drunk Shizuo’s blood already. Shizuo almost tells him that when he broke Izaya’s bones that day, his own hurt, too, but he doesn’t, because they’re too different for that. Whenever Shizuo’s bones broke, they always grew stronger, and when Izaya breaks, it only makes him weak.

“I’m too tired for fights tonight, Shizu-chan,” Izaya says, and once, back when Celty would still reprimand him, when she still thought it would change something, she said, you fight too much.

Shizuo started yelling about how it wasn’t his fault, how he didn’t want to fight, how he just wanted Izaya to fuck off somewhere, only Shinra asked him, if Izaya ran and ran and ran out of Ikebukuro, would you really stop running after him?

We fight a normal amount, Shizuo said then, defensive, and Shinra laughed.

Do you keep count? He asked, delighted. Izaya does, you know.

“If you tell me what you gave him, I promise to not throw anything at you for a month,” Shizuo says, and thinks that maybe it won’t be as hard as he thinks. Already the world’s axis is tilted, as if Earth is but a spool, disturbed now that everything’s unwinding.

Izaya turns around to face him fully and stares at Shizuo with a disturbing mix of pity and self-deprecation, as if he’s laughing not only at Shizuo, but also at himself.

“Do you really think I want that?” he says, no ‘Shizu-chan’ attached to soften how raw he sounds. “Do you really think that’s what I want?”

All that incredulity, and Shizuo doesn’t know what’s happened to them. Hate at first sight, and all he remembers is spotting Izaya for the first time, that smirk ready, and thinking, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, and wanting to collect Izaya’s teeth, blood clinging to the roots, but never doing it somehow.

“It’s like theatre,” Kadota said once, bored, squashing a can in his hand. “There’s an audience watching the fight, and there are swings on the stage, but no one ever actually gets punched.”

Only it doesn’t make any sense because Shizuo won’t hit Izaya now either, when there’s no audience, when they’re alone.

“Are you—” Shizuo starts, not knowing what he’s asking.

“I’ll tell you, and don’t you ever stop,” Izaya says, and Shizuo nods, because he’ll strip Ikebukuro of everything and toss it all Izaya’s way if that’s what Izaya wants.

“My virginity, Shizu-chan, you idiot!” Izaya laughs, howls, and it sounds like blood. Maybe it’s Shizuo’s own, coughed up after all those days, now that it hurts the most. “Why would you think that when you’re sixteen and drunk on information, you always know better?”

As the world unwinds at last, Shizuo remembers that Izaya doesn’t trust anyone, not even himself.

*

In Shizuo’s dream, Izaya has his back to him, and his shoulders shake, as if he’s laughing, because he’s laughing, but what if he’s crying?

Shizuo walks up to him and grabs his sleeve to yank him around and see, but before he can do so, he wakes.

*

Shizuo throws things at Izaya, and if Izaya didn’t dodge, they’d crush him, that’s how it goes. But God, hasn’t he always known that Izaya would dodge them? Hasn’t he always trusted him to?

It does something to Shizuo that Izaya doesn’t always sidestep things, that he might step into their way, even. The two of them, back in high school, the same old ballet, classrooms ruined but Izaya still whole at the end of it, listing bones, and Shizuo thought that was it, that whenever he turned the tv off, the show would stay paused—

He thinks of hands touching Izaya, and it’s easy to not only want to break the fingers one by one, but also imagine it, like he never could with Izaya.

What the fuck have you done, and this is what Izaya’s done, even though he was always supposed to be high up, behind those glass windows, watching and flicking game pieces, untouchable like a child standing over a scattering of toys.

But at sixteen, Izaya didn’t have a brand, or means, or a secretary.

“You said it was something worthless,” Shizuo says, and he sounds weak, feels weak, like he’s underwater, surrendering to some lazy tide.

“Oh, but it was! You think it wasn’t? Stupid little humans, thinking it matters! It hurt quite a bit, that’s all.”

Shizuo imagines Izaya, hollowed out, something taken, taken, taken—

That’s how it goes, with transactions.

“Izaya,” Shizuo says, and it’s different from all the other times he said it, a pathetic plea for something. The shape his mouth forms around the name is unfamiliar, and Shizuo remembers the stretch of it long after Izaya waves his hand like it doesn’t matter and walks away.

“Izaya,” he says again, to no one, and it never felt like this before, like he’s spitting his own heart out between the syllables.

“Izaya,” he says, and thinks that his heart will never stop breaking now.

All those chess pieces Izaya has spilled on his table, and Shizuo never thought that Izaya was one himself.

*

Shizuo is all instinct and impulse. Vengeance doesn’t suit him, but he wears it anyway, shaking Shinra until he tells him everything he knows, shaking Namie until she points a finger, shaking Ikebukuro until clues fall out of it like dusty coins out of an upturned purse.

If he ever saw Izaya cry, he thinks he’d turn the city into an apocalypse, ripping monuments and railway tracks out of the ground, throwing cars, ruining buildings, everything stained red, and ‘old money’ Izaya would say. If he ever saw anyone touch Izaya, he thinks he’d do the same to the whole world, for as long as he’d have hands.

Izaya’s right, he’s never been subtle, and so when he searches, everyone scurries away and hides like cockroaches do when you turn the light on, but Shizuo finds them anyway, one by one, and grinds them to dust.

There’s a good-for-nothing that had money once and now has only lice that Shizuo finds sleeping behind a dumpster, rotting sushi leftovers next to him. There’s a know-it-all who checks his fancy watch instead of being careful and seeing Shizuo come at him. There’s a scum-of-the-earth with bruises from dirty needles all over his forearms whose whining Shizuo listens to for all of ten seconds before landing a hit.

There’s a woman too, drinking old wine in a red dress, and Shizuo is a gentleman, one could say, but he leaves a necklace of a bruise around her neck anyway. In the end, it fits her better than pearls ever will.

His blood doesn’t stop howling, because the man in the camel coat is still laughing somewhere over a deck of cards, an ace slipped into his sleeve and his fingertips once rubbed smooth by the resistance of Izaya’s bones.

All those years ago, Shizuo’s fingers around Izaya’s wrist, he should have known that the dirt bruised into the bone there wasn’t Izaya’s at all. That man, Shizuo thinks into his pillow sometimes, sleepless and imagining Izaya sleep, will be the only one he’ll kill and if it ends up being Izaya’s final proof of Shizuo’s monstrousness, so be it.

He doesn’t always escape unscratched, a crowbar to his head, a fist to his eye, a knife to his side, and Shinra wraps bandages around the top of his head, clicking his tongue.

“When did it happen?” Shinra says, and Shizuo knows that he doesn’t mean the blood, but tells him about the blind alleys and late evenings, anyway.

“What changed?” he asks, and Shizuo doesn’t know how to tell him that all those years of hate, and he still hates, but one naked look from Izaya was enough to make him come undone.

He looked so scared, he thinks, leaning back on the couch, his blood all over the cushions. He looked so scared, and I wanted to murder everyone in sight.

If Izaya gave him the name, Shizuo would leave a corpse at his doorstep like an offering, only Izaya won’t, so he continues combing through Ikebukuro carefully, now he knows what real fleas are like.

*

Days later, Izaya’s still not telling, and so Shizuo takes as many days off as Tom will give him and looks through old yearbooks. A once-classmate tells him that he remembers seeing Izaya on a swing, waiting for someone in an empty park and a man grinding a cigarette to ash with the heel of his shoe.

“You said you wouldn’t stop,” Izaya says across the road, traffic lights bleeding red, and Shizuo picks up heavier and heavier objects, but he always hesitates before throwing now, because he doesn’t quite trust Izaya to move away these days, doesn’t quite trust him to want to.

He considers asking Izaya to borrow him one of his blades, but in the end he decides that when he kills the rat at last, he’ll do it with his own two hands.

“Such strength,” Izaya said once, sitting too high for Shizuo to reach, legs swinging. He was watching Shizuo’s arms and Shizuo felt it like a touch. “You could snap necks as easily as people break shrimp tails.”

“I don’t want to snap necks,” Shizuo said, the world narrowed down suddenly, only the distance between them left. “Except for yours.”

“That would be messy,” Izaya laughed, throat working, tendons moving, a pulse there like something swallowed and trapped. “You’d smell my blood till the end of days.”

And somehow, even though Izaya hardly ever bleeds, even though his neck is still safe, Shizuo smells his blood whenever he wakes, anyway.

I think you should stop, Celty types, leaning on him so heavily that if he stepped away, she’d have to catch herself. But if you’re determined, I’ll help you.

Shizuo smiles, but shakes his head.

“I’m determined,” he says, careful to make his words sound like a thank you, “but I don’t want your help.”

Celty settles her helmet on top of his shoulder, and for a moment, they both forget that she doesn’t have a head.

*

Trying not to kill Izaya is like having a bird peck you to blood and keeping yourself from smashing his little, hollow bird bones to nothing, but Shizuo corners Izaya and tries.

“To think you would do things for me,” Izaya says, back to a wall and head tilted up, a forever of neck bared like something to bite into, and Shizuo thinks of all the people in Ikebukuro with teeth.

“To think,” Shizuo agrees, and circles his fingers around Izaya’s wrist before Izaya can reach for a knife. He brings the wrist up, Izaya’s elbow against the wall, and presses his fingers against the bones as gently as he can, feels the sluggish protest of a pulse. “Tell me what he did.”

“How disgusting,” Izaya says, watching him with hooded eyes, as if Shizuo is boring, only for Izaya, nothing ever is. “Monsters shouldn’t care.”

“Just say a word and I’ll—” Shizuo struggles, and remembers his mother blowing on his bruises, trying to breathe the pain away. Izaya, he thinks, is one big bruise. He leans down, because Izaya’s breath is right there, warm above Shizuo’s bowtie where the collar of his shirt parts, and Shizuo’s suddenly cold.

How strange, that he’d want Izaya for warmth.

“Some people touch like you throw vending machines,” Izaya says, and maybe Shizuo should have held him tighter, because he easily slips his hand free and is gone quicker than Shizuo can blink. Shizuo watches him run, and kicks concrete. Izaya, a kid, a junkie, high on the city and wanting to know everything more than he wanted to be safe. Shizuo imagines meeting him before he dyed his hair, and before Izaya got his knives, some awkward past made of still-drying clay that they could change without having to break it.

In a narrow street, trains rumbling far-off, Shizuo falls apart, and screw Izaya for having a body, and screw everyone else for knowing.

*

When he finally finds the camel-coat man, it takes all in Shizuo to have patience.

He’s all instinct and impulse, and vengeance doesn’t suit him, but he wears it anyway.

“Stay away from my clients, Shizu-chan,” Izaya warned, and Shizuo ignores him, because if Ikebukuro wouldn’t cry over sixteen-years-old Izaya, it won’t cry over this joke of a man either.

He comes on Thursday, elevator pinging as it stops at the top floor, and Izaya wouldn’t let him into the apartment, but that’s no problem, because Shizuo is not a monster, and can be quiet when he wants to.

The man has his hand raised to ring the doorbell already, his knuckle about to press it as if he doesn’t want to leave fingerprints, when Shizuo exhales loud enough to hear.

The hand falters, and Shizuo says, vertebrae.

“Bartender-san?” the man says, a lilt of curiosity to his voice, as if Shizuo is a toy he’ll pay attention to for a few heartbeats.

“The lunate bone,” Shizuo growls, and pushes away from the elevator door.

“May I help you with something?” the man says, and turns around, eyebrows raised already, finger pointedly tapping a watch.

Shizuo grins and says, “ulna.”

“Learning bones, are you?” the man says, all indulgence, and Shizuo has no trouble imagining the spectacular red of his blood. He can already hear Izaya whine about the stained carpet, and he thinks that soon it will all be over, and he’ll have flakes of blood under his fingernails but maybe Izaya will finally be clean.

“No,” Shizuo says, and wonders whoever taught this man that he could bite from the world as he pleases and wipe his mouth after. “I’m just telling you what I’ll do to you.”

“Ah,” the man says, the corners of his lips curling up and how did Shizuo miss it, all those years ago? How did he miss the emptiness of Izaya’s smirk, like a cigarette rolled around nothing but dust? “I see.”

“Calcaneus.”

“It was a business transaction.”

“Scapula.”

“I told him what he wanted to know, and he whined for it so nicely. Well, pretended to, but same difference, really.”

Once, Shizuo had this dream of his lips on Izaya’s bruises, not in kisses, but the way lips fold over food before you take a bite, only if you never bit. All those crushed capillaries, and Shizuo would do everything to not crush them further, even if something inside him itched for it.

He wants to bite now, but he kicks instead, over and over, and the man’s knuckles press the doorbell before the arm slides down as his body slumps like an overturned sack of wheat. Shizuo kicks and kicks, not caring if the man rips and spills. He feels a rage like a cathedral breaking, and when Izaya opens the door, a cup of tea in hand, the man’s whimpering already, and his face looks like raspberry jam.

“The malar bone,” Shizuo tells Izaya over the slumped body, and Izaya makes a strangled noise and stares at him as if it’s the first time, only the first time, all those days ago at a crossroads, was nothing like this. Shizuo can hardly believe the irony of it all, because wasn’t it enough for him to fall in love once?

He’s about to kick the man in the head when Izaya tightens his grip on the cup and hurls it at him, hot tea hitting Shizuo’s face, and his leg faltering.

“I won’t let you kill him,” Izaya says, and Shizuo doesn’t understand.

“Why not?” he asks, forgetting all the bone names he’s learned.

“Because you don’t want me to,” Izaya says, and tugs him by the sleeve, down the hallway, down the stairs, down the street, steps steady but fingers shaking around the fabric. Shizuo thinks that Izaya will be the death of him, but he doesn’t mind if that’s how he goes.

*

In Shinra’s bathroom, Shizuo washes his shoe and hands, and Izaya watches the blood going down the drain like time travel, rust spelled away. They’re standing next to each other – there’s a paradox – and don’t try to kill each other.

“You looked ready for murder, Shizu-chan,” Izaya says, and he sounds like there’s a puncture somewhere in him, malice trickling out.

“I was.”

He watches Izaya mull it over – Shizuo ready to kill for him and this loyal, maybe he is a dog – and remembers seeing him for the first time again. All those years.

“You stupid—” Izaya starts, and Shizuo waits for him to call Shizuo a monster, but it never comes. “I told you it didn’t matter.”

Izaya, sixteen, stupid decisions and where was everyone? Where were his good-for-nothing parents, where were his teachers, where was Shinra?

Where was Shizuo? Busy ripping street signs out of the ground?

“You said it hurt.”

Izaya glances at him out of the corner of his eye, and there’s that smirk that means he’s about to lie.

“Maybe I like it when it does.”

Shizuo considers letting it go, and then sees himself in the mirror, blood-stained and ready to push people off buildings just so Izaya can feel relieved as they hit the ground. He might love all of humanity, but there’s nothing human about all those who took from him.

“I don’t think you do,” Shizuo says, slow. “Not like that.”

“About that,” Izaya says, head tilted, and touches the back of his hand to Shizuo’s reddened cheek. “I like my tea hot.”

“Apology accepted,” Shizuo says, rolling his eyes, and later, after Shinra tells him to smear some gel on his face, he’s not that surprised Izaya slips out and away. It’s more than he should ask for, the two of them in one apartment for an hour and no one reaching for kitchen knives and razor blades.

“He can’t love someone personally, or he’d fall apart,” Shinra says later, like a poor consolation prize. “But what love it would be!”

*

“Keep throwing things at me, Shizu-chan!” Izaya tempts, swaying on top of a pole, ready to laugh. “You promised!”

Shizuo smiles, because God knows, there’s not much left in Ikebukuro to throw, and he’s tired of living in circles.

“There once was a boy,” Shinra recited one day, like a wind-up toy, “who loved all of humanity except for one.”

“Catch me if you can!” Izaya laughs, and Shizuo feels exhaustion in his very bones.

“Let me if you can!” he yells, and Izaya looks surprised for once, like someone who didn’t see the checkmate coming.

He escapes Shizuo, in more ways than one.

*

Shizuo’s been banging on Izaya’s door for minutes by the time Izaya swings it open, reeking of alcohol, smile loose and eyes dancing.

“Shizu-chan!” he exclaims, toppling into the doorframe. “How nice of you to visit!”

“Can I come in?” Shizuo asks, and feels strangely calm. It’s all over now, only the last few loose ends left to deal with.

“I don’t want to see you,” Izaya chokes out, grinning meanly.

“You’re drunk,” Shizuo says, and waits to be called stupid.

“Drunk people usually say what they really mean,” Izaya drawls, and Shizuo laughs and laughs and laughs.

“You never say what you really mean.”

Izaya gives him an unimpressed look and then waves his hand lazily.

“Come in, then,” he says, disappearing into the dark apartment. “I don’t care.”

Inside, Shizuo kicks off his shoes and frowns, smelling wine. The lights are off and he can see only by the glimmers of the city out the window, neon signs and traffic lights smearing as if it’s raining, only it hasn’t rained in days, not even to wash all the blood away. By now, there must be more of it in the sewers than mud, and Ikebukuro might not survive them, but God help him, maybe they’ll survive each other.

Izaya falls to a couch, slumped in something one could mistake for relaxation, and kicks his feet up onto the coffee table.

“Don’t you know this isn’t the sort of place where you take your shoes off?” he says, holding a wineglass by the neck, and sounding the saddest Shizuo’s ever heard him.

“There once was a boy, who loved all of humanity,” Shinra said weeks or months before, stubborn about how it was all a story. “It was one-sided.”

“I’d offer you a drink, but I’ve run out of milk,” Izaya drawls, and Shizuo thinks, damn you.

“Shinra thinks it’s easy to break your heart,” he says, standing in front of Izaya, and when Izaya’s shoulders shake, Shizuo still can’t tell – even awake – if it’s laughter or cries.

“All those crushed capillaries,” Izaya says, quiet but loud enough to make out, the apartment too empty to muffle sounds. “I wanted you to kill him,” he adds after a moment, and his eyes are too wide, too much soul in them, as if he hasn’t sold it to the devil after all.

Even inside, he’s wearing his coat.

“You _stopped_ me,” Shizuo chokes out, hopeless and helpless.

“You’d regret it, later,” Izaya whines, the glass tipping, wine sloshing. “You never regret hurting me.”

Honest now, Izaya, and younger than his years.

“I always regret it,” Shizuo admits, and stares at Izaya’s forearms.

“Shizu-chan,” Izaya says, broken, broken, broken, the way people sound when something hurts. “What happened to all that hate?”

Shizuo’s in pieces.

“Maybe it trickled out with that blood you licked off a knife,” he says, and Izaya seems mournful now, grief all over his face and head tilted back. All those years, and Shizuo thinks he understands now – empty rooms, and Izaya who’d rather go his whole life without having anyone than have them and risk it not lasting forever.

How, no matter how many rooftop edges he walks, he doesn’t want to die.

“You should go to sleep,” Shizuo tells him, and crouches in front of Izaya to start unlacing his shoes. Izaya watches him, impassive, and when Shizuo grabs him by the ankle to push the left shoe off, he pretends the skin is paper.

“I want a bedtime story, then,” Izaya says, the other shoe thumping to the floor. He doesn’t resist when Shizuo pushes at his legs to have them stretch on the couch, pliant like dough, and stares at Shizuo, insistent.

“Alright, then,” Shizuo complies, tugging at Izaya’s arm until he slumps like a doll into something almost horizontal. “Once upon a time, there was boy.”

“How boring,” Izaya breathes, and he smells like bad decisions but Shizuo leans in, anyway.

“The boy was sixteen, wore an ugly coat, and would walk all over town after school, feeding chunks of bread to pigeons.”

“Ah,” Izaya sighs, spilling like someone’s colored him without any care for contours. “You know how to be subtle, after all.”

“The boy hated chess – too boring, and liked knives – just sharp enough. His parents were always away, and he wanted to know everything, no matter what.”

“I don’t like this story.”

“You should let it break.”

Izaya glances at him in the near-dark, and Shizuo grabs a blanket off a chair and throws it across his body.

“You should let your heart break,” he explains, because 2 am is for being cruel. “Mine’s broken over and over again already, and I’m still here.”

This time, when Izaya makes a sound, there’s no mistaking it for anything other than a sob. Shizuo smooths Izaya’s hair off his forehead, and waits for something in the dark and in the quiet. It takes him a while to realize that what he’s waiting is for this to not have to end.

It’s only after Izaya’s breath evens out that he finishes the story.

“The boy had two hundred and eight bones,” he whispers into Izaya’s hair, “and it would stay that way.”

*

When Shizuo wakes with his forehead pushed into the couch’s edge, Izaya’s not there. Shizuo knows instantly that, were he to search the apartment, he wouldn’t find Izaya anywhere – the place seems slumped around his absence like a thrown-off glove.

To hell with you, Shizuo thinks, only he doesn’t mean it, not really, because then he’d have to follow Izaya there.

He walks the streets with calm steps, but yells like he’s never yelled before, and maybe he’ll yell Izaya into being, maybe he’ll yell him out of hiding.

Kasuka called him soon after Shizuo almost killed the camel-coat man, knowing somehow, and they stayed silent longer than usual, to the point where Shizuo kept checking if the connection had broken.

“I see you’ve decided,” Kasuka said eventually, and didn’t have to explain what he meant for Shizuo to know. “I’m glad.”

“If he died, who would be sad?” Shinra said, after Izaya ran away, when Shizuo’s face still stung and he could still smell the tea.

“Wouldn’t you?” Shizuo asked, and it was so telling, that he didn’t know what answer to expect.

“I suppose,” Shinra said after a moment of consideration, and Shizuo didn’t know when he’d ripped Shinra’s carpet to shreds.

He thinks, now, that if he turned back time and paid attention, he’d see Izaya cutting himself on the city, on all it had and all it lacked, bleeding all over the place.

“IZAYA,” he yells, and cars brake, heads turn around, cellphones ping. “COME OUT, YOU FUCKING COWARD!”

He rips street signs out of Ikebukuro’s skin, not to throw them but to hope Izaya will come back, eager to be thrown things at.

They were in high school, and Izaya never had a lunchbox with him, and he would find that one part of the roof where there was no net sometimes, and stand there with his arms spread, the king of the world, salmon on Shizuo’s tongue, and, once, Shizuo thought that if someone kicked Izaya in the back, no one would try to catch him. Even so, staring at the back of Izaya’s collar, his fingers twitched.

“I-ZA-YA,” he roars, and people part like Bible seas, but it doesn’t change anything, Izaya doesn’t step out of the graveyard of broken antennae and cracked advertisements, so Shizuo goes on killing the city and kicking the corpse.

Izaya is the drag of a matchhead against the side of a box, and Shizuo might not like fire, but there’s no smoke without it.

“YOU DESERVE BETTER THAN ‘I SUPPOSE’, GOD DAMN YOU,” he yells, because he knows that Izaya didn’t leave that day, just stayed on the other side of Shinra’s apartment door and listened. He can’t say how he knows, but he remembers pressing his palm flat to the door and not kicking it in because Izaya wouldn’t want him to.

He remembers kicking everything else instead.

“I thought I deserved to die,” Izaya says, all bitter, and there he is, drowning in his stupid fur coat, shoulders hunched, eyes red, and Shizuo meant it when he thought that if he ever saw Izaya cry, the city wouldn’t survive him, because there’s nothing but wreckage around, Ikebukuro bruised and scratched and serves it right.

“I’ve changed my mind,” Shizuo says, still angry but the feeling leaving him slowly like water down the drain.

“You’ll change it again,” Izaya says, a fucking prophet with his fucking know-better-than-you smile, but when has he ever known anything? All his life laughing over chess pieces, too stupid to realize he’s actually crying. Idiot, idiot, what a fucking mess of an idiot—

“Let’s live to find out, shall we?” Shizuo says, and throws a stop sign. Izaya doesn’t dodge, but Shizuo knew that he wouldn’t, and aimed off.

“Oh,” Izaya breathes, the stop sign crashing into a wall behind him. “Do you promise?”

He sounds like a kid, and Shizuo knows now that when Izaya was one, no one promised him a thing.

He smiles.

*

“So you _love_ me now?” Izaya laughs, and maybe Shizuo would tell him if he didn’t sound so mocking.

Instead, he shows him.

Around them, chess, othello and shogi pieces are scattered everywhere, and Shizuo doesn’t remember where the board went, but Izaya hasn’t gotten around to complaining about it yet, so for now he’s safe.

“Shizu-chan,” Izaya says, his fingers tangled in Shizuo’s hair and his heart beating under Shizuo’s cheek, already growing around the break. “How many bones do you have?”

Shizuo laughs, and thinks that somehow, they’ll be fine.

“Fuck knows,” he breathes into Izaya’s chest, and thinks that if, back on that roof, he’d been close enough to kick Izaya off the edge, he’d have been close enough to catch him, too. “All that matters is that you have two hundred and eight.”

And he names the bones as he kisses down Izaya’s body, one by one.

**Author's Note:**

> (spoilers) because how do you rate something that doesn't have sex or gore but has people breaking bones and licking others' blood off knives? And includes references to sleeping around for information while sixteen? Teen and up audiences? Mature? Send help? 
> 
> Please have mercy on me, English is not my first language and I've been writing this for three days, ignoring my Shizaya playlist and listening to kpop all the while.
> 
> The poem fragments at the beginning, if anyone's interested, are from this beautiful thing I found on the internet aka the unintentionally offical Shizaya poem, fight me. Here's the link to the whole thing: https://hellopoetry.com/poem/1654999/the-chicken-boy/
> 
> Thank you for reading!

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[Podfic] The Catalogue of Bones](https://archiveofourown.org/works/26552293) by [siriliyi](https://archiveofourown.org/users/siriliyi/pseuds/siriliyi)


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